A Mossman farm has become a demonstration site for Zuni bowls – a solution to gully erosion.

Landholders, engineers, council officers and contractors are visiting the property to learn how to build the structures, where they work best and how they can be used more widely to fight erosion in Tropical North Queensland.

Terrain NRM’s Ruginia Duffy said two Zuni bowls had been built on the farm.

“They are a smaller-scale, cost-effective way for landholders to stop erosion from advancing,” Ms Duffy said. “These bowls follow on from work on an Atherton Tablelands farm last year, where smaller bowls were built and have settled into the landscape.”

Zuni bowls are a lining of rocks built into gully heads where there are abrupt vertical drops. They take their name from the Native American Pueblo people from the Zuni River Valley, who first developed and used the structures.

“These days, work starts with a bobcat and ends with shovels and crowbars,’’ Ms Duffy said. “The structures are carefully designed to prevent water from disturbing the soil any further. They work with the natural landscape – by mimicking the kind of forms found in creeks.”

The latest bowls are part of a larger project repairing flood damage in the Mossman region. Other parts of the project have included more traditional earthworks, rock work and tree-planting to stabilise creekbanks that bore the brunt of floods in the 2018-19 wet season.

The Mossman Integrated Catchment Repair Project is funded by the Queensland Government’s Natural Resources Investment Program.

Rock work and grasses are replacing erosion on a cattle property near Innisfail as part of a $2.3 million project to improve the land and better protect the Great Barrier Reef.

More than 200 tonnes of rock has transformed two sites on the Loudon family’s East Palmerston farm, where changes to cattle and pasture practices are also making a difference.

Stuart Loudon said the property, on Berner and Fishers Creek, had been farmed by the family since the 1960s. “It’s hilly land and when it’s wet, it’s really wet,’’ he said. “We’ve been working on improving the soil, our pastures and the land so it can better handle our cattle and the wet seasons.”

The third-generation grazier has welcomed recent earth and rock work by Terrain NRM at a creek crossing and on an eroded hillside.

“The crossing area had eroded over time because of a natural spring bubbling up out of the ground above the creek in the wet season and the ongoing cattle and farm vehicle traffic,” Terrain’s Vanessa Drysdale said. “It’s the only way to access another section of the farm so we’ve laid a rock bed that’ll get cattle and traffic over soft ground without causing more erosion.”

Ms Drysdale said a gully head was forming beside a sloping pasture on another section of land where cattle once moved between paddocks. “Water was running down the cattle pads in the wet season and being funnelled into the rainforest at a gateway, causing more and more gully erosion,’’ she said. “We’ve created a bowl-shaped area and a bund so that the water spreads out over a much wider area on its way to natural waterways and doesn’t make its way to the gully head anymore.”

Mr Loudon is following up with more fencing, to keep cattle off creek banks and create another paddock for rotational grazing. He said a shift to more natural pasture enhancers was also helping to improve the land.

“We don’t use a lot of fertiliser here anymore – we’re applying a fair bit of fish emulsion and worm juice,’’ he said. “We’ve been doing that for about four years and we’re seeing healthier soil and thicker grass.”